Editorial | Why history isn't a thing of the past

American abolitionist Frederick Douglass

Carter Woodson was an early example of being the change he wanted to see.

He was raised in West Virginia, and mostly taught himself until the age of 17, when he went to work in the coal mines at the dawn of the 20th century. He also became a part-time student at a segregated high school and earned his diploma in fewer than two years. After a short stint as a teacher and principal, he went to Berea College in Kentucky, the first integrated college in the South, and earned a bachelor of literature degree. (Incidentally, Mr. Woodson earned that degree one year before the Kentucky legislature passed a law to force the school to segregate.) The Berea degree led to further study at the University of Chicago and Harvard University, where he was the second African American to earn a Ph.D.; the first was W.E.B. Dubois.

It was Mr. Woodson who pioneered and championed the study of black history, and who suggested there be a dedicated time for its celebration. He chose the second week of February because it included the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, both great liberators of African Americans and their futures. Mr. Woodson wanted to see the week preserved until it was no longer needed, and that day would be when the US had reached a day in which African-American history had become part and parcel of American history.

Are we there yet?

Depends on who answers.

Even though Americans have now elected, and re-elected, their first president of color, and that accomplishment cannot be underestimated, there also are many signs that we do not live in a post-racial or color-blind nation or society, that we still do not fully include or commemorate minority history in American history, and that black history still merits a month of awareness, which is February.

Awareness of an important part of that history, a part very much in the tradition of Mr. Woodson's priorities, was raised in recent days in The Courier-Journal, when reporter Martha Elson wrote about local and national efforts to preserve what were known as Rosenwald schools.

The schools - about 5,000 schools and buildings in 15 Southern states - were built between 1912 and 1932 for the education of African-American students, an achievement that grew out of a fruitful collaboration between Booker T. Washington, the founder of the Tuskegee Institute (now University), and Julius Rosenwald, president of Sears, Roebuck and Co.

Seven of the schools were built in Jefferson County, almost 160 throughout Kentucky. Ms. Elson's Feb. 14 story told of the push to preserve one in particular, the old Jefferson Jacob School off River Road in the Harrods Creek area. As she reported, "it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places last year, and as part of a legal settlement last month related to the Ohio River Bridges Project, it is eligible to receive money for rehabilitation from a $1.7 million Historic Preservation and Enhancement Fund that will be set up under the settlement."

That is great news for preservationists and for the community in general. The local Masonic group which uses the building for a lodge is seeking a grant from the fund to renovate the building, which means it could stand much longer as a reminder of a past that's not all that long ago - when children couldn't expect to be treated equally under the law, and an extraordinary partnership that fought the blight of prejudice produced engines of learning in far-flung places.

The buildings tell a heroic story of people who wouldn't take no for an answer, of people who worked to unleash the brain power of all children, of people who knew, firsthand from what was then recent history, the truth that Frederick Douglass spoke when he said:

"It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men."

We have not outgrown or outrun that thought, and it should not be lost on us now. The occasion of Black History Month, and the great news that an old school for segregated African-American students has a decent shot at a longer future to enrich our understanding of our people and place, gives us a new opportunity to rededicate ourselves realizing its powerful truth.

Louisville, Kentucky • Southern Indiana

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Editorial | Why history isn't a thing of the past

Carter Woodson was an early example of being the change he wanted to see. He was raised in West Virginia, and mostly taught himself until the age of 17, when he went to work in the coal mines at the